JamesX

Make poverty history.

Every single day, 30,000 children die, needlessly, of extreme poverty.

On July 6th, we finally have the opportunity to stop that shameful statistic.

8 world leaders, gathered in Scotland for the G8 summit, will be presented with a workable plan to double aid, drop the debt and make the trade laws fair. If these 8 men agree, then we will become the generation that made poverty history.

But they’ll only do it if enough people tell them to.

Sign the Live 8 list now… www.live8live.com

Thanks Richard!!

Yesterday I picked up my new 7.1 surround amplifier for my room. It’s the replacement for my old one which died two years ago and I decided to get myself a birthday present. It’s been a long time and the poor speakers collected a lot of dust. But all that has changed now and the system has returned to its former glory. Although I don’t have enough speakers to get the full 7.1 experience, I have got 5 channels hooked up at the moment so I’ll have to expand gradually.

The unit itself is the Pioneer VSXD814. It switches video sources too so that I can simply hook everything in the room into it and let it do all the work. So I have the VCR, Foxtel, PS2, Airport Express, CD and Tape Deck all runnnning through it at the moment. Really cool stuff. I’ll try to get a pic of the unit so you know what I’m talking about.

I have to say thanks to Richard for getting me such a good price on it. Now all I need to get is a few more sets of cables to hook more gear up. :)

This afternoon I signed up to Audioscrobbler - thanks Tom for reminding me to sign up. Since they don’t accept sign-ups all the time, I’m glad I’m in the loop. Basically it’s a site that keeps track of what music you listen to and displays stats on your music taste. All you need to do is download a plugin for the music player you use and you’re all set. Like any open source project, it’s always getting better. Audioscrobbler is a pretty cool service, and it’ll only get better. There are stacks of features still to come so it will be interesting to see the site develop into a true online community.

To track my profile, click here.
To visit Audioscrobbler and get your own account, click here.

21.52 UPDATE:
I’ve also discovered some really cool tools to update ID3 tags on your MP3s. It’s based on MD5 and downloads track information from the web. If you already have ID3 tags, it will use what you know and try to fill any gaps you may have. Very cool stuff, especially if you have the amount of songs that I do!
Mac Version: iEatBrainz!
PC Version: MusicBrainz Tagger

I’m so happy. This morning, my new Dolby Digital 5.1 sound card arrived for my Powerbook. I’m so excited, my ears are in pure ecstasy. It’s probably been about a month now since I had to sacrifice the 5.1 for a horrible 2 speakear setup (that only used the rear left and right speakers). The new sound card is a M-Audio Sonica Theater. It was quite a challenge to find somewhere that stocks it in Australia, but after much Googling, I came across Awave in Melbourne. The card itself is just like a typical sound card. It’s capable of 7.1 sound too, so if I ever decide to upgrade my speakers, I can support them easily with this baby. Although I think the day I replace these speakers is a little way off yet! It also supports Windows and Mac - with software! - so that’s a bonus too.

Today I’ve been updating the album art on my iTunes music library. After I leeched a heap of new music of Chris the other day, the collection has grown to 40GB. There are about 7,500 songs all up and almost all of them need the album art adding. It’s a huge task and I’ve spent most of the afternoon today searching for the covers and adding them into iTunes. So far, I’ve done the bulk of the full albums that I have which is probably about half of the collection. It’s all the singles that will take time to add and I’ll end up doing them as the come up in the playlist. The art does add colour to iTunes and it’s something different to play with.

LINK:
How-to: iTunes album art